The first time I experienced mezcal, was in Tulum, Mexico. I don’t recall much of what it tasted like (a testament to its potency), but I do remember trying to buy a bottle of it off the bartender at two a.m., as music drowned out the nighttime hum of the surrounding jungle, and liquor was poured into tumblers in steady streams from up high. Yet rather than politely asking me to leave, he told me—with great enthusiasm—about his father in Oaxaca, who was the mezcalero behind this particular rare brand of mezcal, and offered to bike over to my hotel the following afternoon with a couple of bottles for me. Late the next day, as I walked past the front desk, I spotted those two bewitching bottles, bound together with a note that said my name on it.

According to Yana Volfson, beverage director at Enrique Olvera’s restaurants

Atla in New York City, my experience was far from unique. “We use the word rare when we talk about something our grandma gave us, like a rare broach. With a rare agave that took 35 years to grow, it was probably your father or your grandfather who planted that seed and it might be a rare experience for this person to be seeing a harvest,” she says. “Rare is emotional, it’s generational, it’s something that makes you feel.”

Volfson’s whole business is mezcal, and as Americans start to drink more of it, she’s working to show that the high-proof spirit is a lot more complex than "smoky," a word that is invariably used to describe it. The culture of mezcal, which is made from the hearts of a combination of different agave plants rather than just one (like tequila is), lies in stark contrast to the margarita-swilling, shot-taking traditions that will take place in the U.S. this Cinco de Mayo. Head to a mezcaleria like Bósforo, La Clandestina, or Bar Mexicano in Mexico City, Volfson says, and you’ll find unlabeled bottles on the shelves instead of brands, orange slices and worm salt in place of limes and, well, regular salt, and a general sense of “organized chaos” born out of a wild, electrifying, underground culture that is still quite new to Mexico.

“Mezcal wasn’t valued by its own people just ten years ago,” says Volfson. “It’s a spirit that has so much history, but is also very much in the present.” Yet while this sense of the unknown is exciting, it also means we don’t have the language to talk about mezcal in the same way we do about, say, wine. In other words, ordering from a lengthy mezcal menu for the first time is a daunting experience (Atla carries some 40 or so variations). “My advice with mezcal is to always have an open mind—allow your palate to like something or not like something,” says Volfson. “Taste first and read second.”

When we sit down at Atla to try some mezcals together, Volfson guides me through it with a series of different pairings. The first one we try, Nuestra Soledad San Baltazar Gregorio Martinez García, is sipped in between nibbles of coffee beans; the second, Rezpiral Mexicano Berta Vasquez, I discover, is best consumed with a slice of salty avocado; and the last, Vago Tobala Emigdio Jarquín, is paired with—perhaps surprisingly—fresh strawberries. “One thing people have a tendency of asking for is something smoky, so [we’re] helping people explore other flavors,” says Volfson. “As you walk through one door, there’s always another door to open.”

Volfson sees Atla’s menu—and the emerging mezcal scene across the U.S.—as “a way to empower a Latin American country that is finding a pride within a product that it didn’t for a long time.” When I ask her to recommend some of her favorite mezcaleros, however, Volfson encourages me to give myself up to the unknown instead. “I like to keep my crushes secret.”